After studying physics at ENS, you launched the website covoiturage.fr, which became BlaBlaCar in 2013. How did you originally get this idea?
The idea came from the fact that I'm from Vendée and I had to go back to Vendée for the end-of-year holidays, and all the trains were fully booked. I ended up asking my little sister, who had a car, to pick me up in Paris. She was living in Rouen at the time, to take me down to Vendée. And on the A10 highway, when you take it, you get overtaken by TGVs. And I told my little sister, "Well, you see, I know there are no seats on that train because I tried to get one and everything was fully booked." And at the same time, I saw dozens, hundreds, thousands of empty seats in cars that were going in the exact same direction. There were plenty of empty seats to go to Vendée, but they weren't on the trains anymore; they were in the cars. So we just had to find a way to make all these empty seats available to all the travelers who wanted them. I was lucky enough to be able to make the trip with my little sister and therefore have a seat in my little sister's car, but that didn't make for a national service because you had to know my little sister. So that wasn't available to everyone. And so I thought, "Well, we're going to make an engine where you can book seats in all cars as simply as you book a seat on a train or an airplane."
Since then, BlaBlaCar has become a unicorn, just like other French gems. But what allowed you to turn this innovation into a sustainable market player, since even today BlaBlaCar remains a market leader?
I think we are, first of all, based on a need to travel that is recurring, that doesn't change—except during pandemic periods, as we saw. There's that. Then there's also international expansion. You have to realize that today, 85% of BlaBlaCar's activity is outside of France. France is only 15% of the business. We were in about twenty countries, and now about forty, because as you may have followed about a week ago, we launched in about twenty new countries. So there you go, we will be in 40 countries across several continents. That also helps a lot because, in fact, we also seek growth where it is in new countries, and also by diversifying to some extent with carpooling, buses, and trains, since we now also distribute train tickets. So basically on the BlaBlaCar platform, you find carpooling, buses, and trains. You can compare schedules, prices, departure points, and arrival points. In fact, it's very practical. It's also this innovation, this innovative and ambitious nature, which seeks growth where it is in other countries, that keeps BlaBlaCar at the top.
Speaking of which, what is BlaBlaCar's impact in terms of carbon footprint reduction, knowing that the service optimizes vehicle usage? That was even your original idea?
Yes, completely. So, we calculated it over hundreds of millions of trips: it amounts to over 4 million tons of CO2 saved each year thanks to BlaBlaCar. That is the equivalent of 0.8% of the CO2 emissions of a country like France, since 500 million tons of CO2 were emitted by France each year, and it is more than three times the annual road traffic CO2 emissions of a city like Paris. So that's just to give a sense of scale.
It is quite considerable, but having said that, there is obviously still a lot to do. What is certain is that, obviously, it's better to have two or three people per car than two or three cars per person in ecological terms, of course.
Recently, you mentioned it just now, you announced your expansion into 20 new countries. What enabled you to reach this new milestone and go this far ultimately? Is it really because foreign markets genuinely have this need, or did you want to conquer other territories without really knowing exactly what you would find?
It's a mix of both. That is to say, first, there is a form of maturity in our business—the business of connecting people who are making the same trips at the same time. And so basically, wherever there are roads and mobile phones, BlaBlaCar can be present. We have the know-how to build platforms of this type and deploy them across different countries. There are also opportunities, and you also have to do it early enough in the sense that for a carpooling service to develop to its full potential in a country, it generally takes several months, several years to achieve sufficient liquidity on the marketplace. That is, a critical mass so that when someone searches for a trip, they find someone doing the exact same one. All of this requires investing at a given moment in deploying into new countries so that within 2, 3, or 5 years, the service is fully deployed, totally useful, with millions of people using it. That's what we saw happen with various countries like Mexico, Brazil, and India, where we started the service several years ago, and it's really now that we're seeing the results, since the two countries with the most carpooling in the world on our platform, with BlaBlaCar, are Brazil and India. So we see that it was worth establishing ourselves in those countries, and now we really see the volume coming in.
Were these countries where the concept of carpooling already existed beforehand, or did you really introduce it to these countries?
Well, no, it didn't really exist. That is to say, sometimes there were a few small sites that tried to replicate us, because we are quite visible as a company today since we are present in dozens of countries. Sometimes there are geographical areas where certain entrepreneurs wanted to try launching something similar to us. So sometimes small platforms like that started up. Sometimes not; sometimes not at all. And so we arrive by deploying everything we know how to do, both in carpooling and also in bus marketplaces, because we do that too. And typically in countries like Brazil where there are no trains, when we arrive and offer carpooling and buses, we inevitably become an extremely popular solution.
How do you do that? I remember there were certain cloud services years ago that, when they launched, faced difficulties because people didn't necessarily know the concept of the cloud and stored their data on external hard drives or USB drives instead. They weren't searching for the product on search engines because they weren't aware of it. Isn't that also an obstacle sometimes in carpooling? If people don't know the concept, they won't search for it.
Completely. But there are two things that are important for us when we start. The first is that we generally communicate heavily with the media, obviously, because there is a need to go out and explain exactly what it is. So we can't simply run traditional ads or marketing communications because it's too quick; you don't have the time to explain exactly what carpooling is. So there is a form of education that relies heavily on the media, through interviews and in-depth explanations of what carpooling is. And then, you have to realize that when people discover carpooling, they find it so great that they talk about it to everyone. So there is an extremely positive word-of-mouth that develops quite quickly and grows the community. That means very often people get into carpooling because they have a friend who carpools and speaks very highly of it.
So, clearly, the French ecosystem still allows for the creation of unicorns, as we've seen, and ultimately economic empires. What difficulties have you encountered as an entrepreneur over all these years?
I think I faced pretty much every difficulty entrepreneurs face, in the sense that, well, at the beginning nobody believes in it.
So you face a lot of resistance, a lot of pity in people's eyes, where they think, "Well, that's weird. He was off to such a good start, but he decided to..." He had a good education, he had a real job...
Exactly. And he leaves everything to build a website for beatniks who hitchhike. So inevitably, that can surprise more than a few people. So we face a lot of reluctance in that way. Afterwards, obviously, there are all the pure technical implementation hurdles, because execution is quite complex. You have to make the service known. So there's a massive communication challenge, and a challenge to reassure everyone—not only about the fact that, yes, it is legal to carpool, but also that, yes, you know who you are getting in the car with, so you can go ahead. There is a trust system, an identity verification system, things like that. All of that gets put in place over the years as you develop the system. We see it clearly every time we restart in a new country; we go through all these stages again. And then there are pure stages of growth, of building a company, which involve all the financial, recruitment, and administrative aspects.
Today, approximately how many employees does BlaBlaCar have?
There are 1,000 people in the BlaBlaCar group.
